I suspect that this affects a lot of folks in tech. There's a lot of money to be made, so people get into it. They don't really like what they do, so it's always a chore. Their work often shows it, too.
I'm retired. I don't have to write software, but I spend more time writing software (for free), than I did, for most of my career.
I like the Integrity part, too. That seems to be something that's missing (from most vocations), these days. One of the reasons that I stuck with my last job for so long, was because the people I worked with, and for, had Integrity, and that's pretty important to me.
The older I get, the more I realize what a critical component of personal and social relationships it is, and how deeply it reinforces virtually everything good in society. There's never a good reason to forgo it, and never a good reason to accept spending time with people who don't have it. It only leads to trouble.
I started my career in ad tech and it was often such abject misery because of this. I couldn't put my finger on it at the time, but a large part of the problem was working with people who had very little integrity. They were great at masking it and presenting a different persona, but ultimately, we did bad things to people and made filthy money. I don't miss anything about it.
Not in a "new-grad or corporate PR appropriating meaningless platitudes" kind of way. But in a "I have seen multiple times how one untrustworthy person can easily wreck all the work of a team or organization, and make their lives miserable, so averting that is a high priority" kind of way.
Lately, in business context, I tend to characterize what I seek from people as "alignment". I think that many (not all) business people are still willing to buy in on that.
And it will just have to be a given that the company and team goals with which people are aligned are respectable.
What seems to be getting more difficult in the last few years is finding companies with respectable goals. Of course you knew to avoid any company in crypto. But now, with with a new VC gold rush of AI (often involving the same people who were happy to run crypto scams), there aren't a lot of startups that look respectable.
Not all AI companies, nor all companies doing AI, are bad. But how do you find a respectable one, in a gold rush?
People around you can "smell" your passion and sometimes it energizes your team. It makes people around you give more of a damn.
You really just have to find something you care about. This is especially easy at the big tech companies, but for some reason, most engineers don't even think about it - they get stuck in this miserable loop of stress and hating their work.
The better places to work have some ability to filter it out. Not perfectly, but enough to make it hard to be there if your goal is to max your paychecks while minimizing and/or hating your work.
Same. Claude/Gemini/DeepSeekV4/Qwen3.6 are enabling me to do way more experimentation than I could do on my own. 10X at least. Not getting paid for any of it, but that's OK, getting paid imposes limitations on what you can work on and imposes responsibilities that I don't care to have anymore. There's a certain kind of integrity in that as well.
Integrity is great. Their dapp is solid and currently offers 2,000 free prediction market tokens when signing up with your biometric data.
If you haven't signed up yet hit me up for my rec code: you'll get an extra 1,000 tokens and I get 5x credits!
The reason is that if you're truly good at something, if you have a real talent for it, then it's easy for you to do it well from the start, so you rarely judge it or realize how good you are. Just as no one thinks they're good at their heartbeat and breathing. Because you have the talent to be good at them from the beginning, so you don't put in much effort to learn them, and therefore you don't realize how difficult they are.
I think a real way to discover your strengths is not to reflect on what you do well, but on what makes you most frustrated when you see others doing it. It feels like an experienced driver watching a student drive and getting frustrated: Why can't you do such a simple action correctly? If you find yourself constantly wondering on something: why can't everyone just do this and it's so simple? You can remind yourself that that one might not be simple at all, but rather that you possess a genuine talent for it.
This could be surprisingly hard. You can't get income at some point, and you still have obligations, e.g. a family. You have some things which are hard to reduce (e.g. monthly telecom payments) or have significant upfront costs (you can move far enough to reduce rental costs, but the move will only beneficial after months). It's so much easier to take some debt, at least initially. The author doesn't give good advises for how to avoid getting into debt.
Edsger Dijkstra, in one of his letters, giving advice (IIRC) to a PhD student: "Do only what only you can do."
Kind of funny to see one of the greatest computer scientists and one of the greatest public entertainers giving the same advice, but I guess that speaks strongly in its favor.
"Work at the job that you do not hate"
In other words, not all vocations that you are great at and talented and want to pursue are valued by current world.
I love playing chess way more and actually am reasonably good at it, but programming and teaching are valued more and I like those too.
As Jimmy O. Yang's father reportedly said: "Pursuing your dreams is how you become homeless"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GO6ntvIwT2k&t=22s
At the same time you have to be out there in the world, increase your luck surface - if you sit in your cubicle/room/private chatroom all day you are less likely to make a mark on the world despite your brilliance.
Again I forgot which artist said it but that in New York art scene the most successful artists spent most of their working days socializing not painting/sculpting etc.
I think this probably applies to every career. You have to navigate within your available options to balance things that pay well with the ones you enjoy doing.
I have a side project that I truly enjoy working on. It is big enough that I have spent years working on it in my spare time. I am still trying to find traction for it in the market. If it ends up making me a lot of money, then great; but if it never makes anything, I have still enjoyed building it.
If you work on projects in groups often, you might be able to find what fits you by what things you end doing especially if you do those parts well. Do you read and interpret the directions, do you do the assembly, do you keep the group on task, do you verify the output is acceptable, do you figure out how to proceed when there's a problem, etc.
Also, what tasks do people who know you ask you to help with; especially if those people have choices for who to ask and then specifically ask you. Those are things that likely fit you; especially if you get enjoyment out of doing those tasks, beyond the enjoyment you might get from doing any task for someone. Sometimes, you might get asked to do these things for reasons other than you're good at them, or you may be good at them and also hate doing it, etc; so like be aware of that.
If you're lucky, what fits you is distinctive and commercially apprechiated. But not everyone has those fits, so it's good to also look for things that fit well enough to pay the bills. You may need to develop other skills to get into a position to use your good fit as well.
Me and my roommates living room in college [1].
Does anyone else feel like they overindex on this principle? I have on multiple occasions found myself too conservative to take advantage of the leverage available to me. (Example: doing a refinance in 2020 I could have taken out a 30-year mortgage at the rock-bottom rate, but chose to do 15. This is irrational given that I could have taken all the money I didn't have to pay toward the mortgage and even putting it in completely safe investments, come out ahead (even before considering the mortgage interest deduction).
I'm not saying I envy those leveraged up to their necks, but I think growing up in a family that didn't really have any money and did have a lot of the bad kind of debt made it hard for me to feel comfortable owing money even when it would probably be in my best interest (no pun intended).
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/8581/8581-h/8581-h.htm
Previous discussion (2023-01-20, 69 comments):
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2. Avoid Debt Like the Plague In a world where home prices are worth decades of pre-tax salary, where less than a third of home purchases are cash, and where most of those are older people with accumulated wealth or previous paid-for property, this more or less equates to saying to young people "do not ever think about owning the place you live in".
3. Whatever You Do, Do It With All Your Might While I agree that success generally is a result of work+opportunity, I have seen it come from the opposite enough times that I have a hard time believing it really is remotely close to be one of the main factors of financial success.
4. Preserve Your Integrity For some reason, I heavily doubt the majority of the true wealth ~hoarders~ holders of this world got there from integrity.
Also, he later became a poet (a very good one, too, if I remember right) and early on in his life tried to be a pop singer. Feels a bit like that whole multi-decade career as founder and owner of a massive publishing empire was an odd detour for him.
Very fascinating person, and the book's definitely worth reading.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Richest_Man_in_Babylon
Avoiding greed, envy, the hedonic treadmill, etc, will never not be good advice.
And yes, yes, of course there are good people out there too that just want (/need) money to get by, but it’s funny to read this and think about those with _lots_ of money
Imagine you are good at programming. Great, now get a programming career. Oops, it's the 19th century and computers aren't a thing. Tough luck.
The private rules for the Robber Barons were almost the exact opposite of Barnum’s advice (build skills, avoid debt, work hard, be honest):
1. Control the Vocation of Others: Ensure you own the system in which others work. Vertical and horizontal integration of your businesses is the mechanism by which you ensure all the value created by labor ends up in your pocket.
2. Use Other People's Debt as a Weapon: Strategic debt is your friend, and you can generate corporate debt so vast it becomes a systemic threat. Ensure you have access to pools of capital, so that during a a panic you can buy assets for pennies on the dollar. Inflate the stock price of your holding company far beyond its actual assets, and become a giant creditor. If your debt-financed bet fails, ensure the bag is held by the public. Privatize the gains, socialize the risks.
3. Whatever You Own, Defend With All Your Political Might: You need the ability to shape legislation, control the courts, and deploy state violence to protect your assets and destroy competition. Bribery, lobbying and blackmail are your tools. Those political expenditures are your real insurance policy when your assets are threatened by populist anger or economic chaos, and will also grease expansion into new markets and help you capture foreign resources (oil, bananas, etc.).
4. Control the Definition of Integrity: Never break the law and steal from business partners; instead, change the laws to make your actions legally defensible in court. Claim that the only integrity that matters is the confidence of the capital markets. Stock manipulation, bribery of politicians, and crushing competition with frivolous patent lawsuits are just enterprise, public service, and fairness. Your integrity is your public image as a builder and a captain of industry. Hire biographers and buy newspapers to tell this story.
Finally, blame the victim. Tell the destitute it’s their own fault that they hadn’t figured out how to successfully navigate a system designed to strip their wealth from them and hand it over to the monopolists. This same self-help message of ‘individual responsibility for your economic condition’ is constantly pumped out to the American public today by an endless stream of self-help books in the Robber Baron 2.0 era, and for the same reasons.
Things looking good is not necessarily the same as things working out financially.
I didn't have any special talents, outstanding skills, or privileges. In my twenties, I worked 69 hours a week for two straight years. Yet, I only made minimum wage and had nothing to show for it. I didn't develop any meaningful skills, either. Simply putting in the effort didn't guarantee I would get everything.
Ironically, it was the choices I made during my downtime—taking a step back, reflecting, and reorganizing my thoughts—that actually allowed me to earn more money. Even then, the working hours were much shorter, around 52 hours a week. That choice was programming. (Though, to be fair, even that is getting tougher now because of LLMs.)
My conclusion is that all advice from successful people is heavily packaged. I constantly think about the concept of 'effort.' What exactly is genuine effort? What is deliberate practice? In modern capitalism, the kind of effort that gets rewarded isn't trading time for money; true success lies in building assets that decouple your time from your income.
However, even that feels somewhat meaningless to me now. If we constantly assign value to everything and strive only to be the 'best,' I'm always left wondering: does that make me a meaningless person?
Looking at it coldly, I am heading into my mid-thirties, and I have only just finished paying off my student loans and the debt I incurred from being scammed. I don't have a fancy degree, nor have I built a globally renowned program.
My bank account currently sits at $30, and I'm worried about next month's rent. But because I've survived so many different grinds, I have the confidence that I'll figure out a way to live on somehow. Though, I do feel a bit regretful about not having been married yet.
More importantly, though, I feel that the more value we place purely on money, the more the other joys of life fade away. Living life itself is an effort. Pausing to look back is also an effort. The only thing that truly renders the time in our lives meaningless is believing that the 'present me' has nothing left to learn from the 'past me.' Everything I've gone through has definitively helped me in some way.
I believe these types of books are ultimately just acts of assigning arbitrary values to sell copies. They manufacture the idea that their specific worldview is the 'correct' one just to collect book royalties and speaking fees. But the way I see it, life is not built on these linear values. Life rests on non-linearity.
The more you try to cram life into a linear framework, the more you inevitably lose the non-linear values. Think about how computers represent numbers. Human cognition perceives a continuous, infinite line, but computers represent it as discrete dots (floating-point numbers), right? I believe there is a similar kind of 'precision loss' in life when forced into linearity.
Capitalism defines surplus, "meaningless" time as an inefficiency and preaches that we must try our absolute best at all times. But from everything I know, the world simply doesn't work that way. There are only people who desperately want to believe it works that way.
Some people waste their time on a stack of paper filled with mere letters. Some waste it making images appear on a computer screen. Others shed tears while watching television. None of these actions make absolute logical sense, and I believe life is precisely the sum total of all these incomprehensible acts.
I highly doubt whether it is right to confine the entirety of life into a tiny box called 'success.' I believe the shape of that 'success box' depends entirely on the shape of one's own life. From that perspective, the showman's text doesn't address the complex leverage required in modern society; it simply looks like a tool designed to sell the false illusion of the American Dream.
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Look for those who are trying to serve established respectable professions, ideally have already done so for many years or decades. Accounting, Legal, Healthcare, Journalism (in the ideal sense).
Then look at their own mission. Then look at their own work. Do they show their work? Are they open? Do they willingly allow their customers to audit their work product? Does how they talk about their work match the work product itself? Does the thing do what it says on the tin? Are they hypocrites with respect to those they serve or those they manage?
These are my strategies and I’ve found they lead to working almost exclusively with people who have high Integrity.
>Accounting, Legal, Healthcare, Journalism
In America, in 2026, this is a particularly dark joke.
I hated it, and wrote my resignation during one of these meetings without even having a solid plan of what I would do next.
A company can make money and provide a good service and experience for clients at the same time.
I worked for a Japanese company, for a long time, and the Japanese were really big on personal relationships.
They weren't necessarily "warm and fuzzy" ones, but they were based on mutual respect and shared interests. I worked with many folks for decades, and we got to know each other well. We didn't always like each other, but we respected and supported each other.
Personal Integrity isn't something that can be faked. If you are in the kind of relationship I just described, fake integrity will be exposed fairly soon.
That's because of the business culture we have here.
One of the more amusing things, while I worked there, was watching Americans thinking they had the Japanese fooled.
> People around you can "smell" your passion and sometimes it energizes your team as well.
When hiring I always look for this, if someone is passionate about the work it often means they will put the effort in to be good at it, and it raises the team in a lot of ways.
Sounds like you like having stuff, not building stuff.
I use the standard $20/ChatGPT Pro sub, and run Thinking 5.5 as a chat interface.
I use it like a "trusted personal advisor," as opposed to a "black box employee."
I'm intimately involved in almost every step of the development process. Most of what I ask from the LLM, is function-length snippets.
It's made a huge difference in the velocity and scope of my work.
I have learned that I need to be very careful, though. The LLM sometimes really borks things, and I have to rip out the garbage, and rewrite the code, myself. I can't even imagine the quality of "vibe-coded" software.
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All of those elements are present for me while using AI to augment my output. I have started using voice to interact with my coding harness though and I think that has maybe influenced my opinion. I also don't let things go fully autonomously and look at the diffs along the way.
I asked for examples of how the algorithm worked. I asked for examples of how to call the code. I asked for a happy-path unit test and a simple error-handling unit test. I asked it to rewrite something as a pure function. I pointed out an obvious race condition and told it to guard against that issue. I asked it to rewrite a function in the style of this other function. I told it to separate one function into two separate functions that handle the first step and the second step separately.
Etc etc.
If you don't understand it, ask for more or better comments, or better variable names, or cut down the scope into a smaller section, or more examples.
Edit: also I almost entirely leave the LLM in read only mode... I tell it to make the smallest change possible, and tell it I will only copy paste it in its proposed change when I understand the change and where it needs to be made. That way it's my hands on the keyboard, interacting with the code by making recommended changes... 80% of the code is touched by me (via copy-paste) most-of-the-way before I will 'git commit'.
Sure, there was one recursive folder descent function that found the most recent file modification time that I didn't fully understand, but it's self-contained in a function, I don't care to learn every corner of file modification times, and it appears to work, so I left it as is for my static site generator.
I get a real joy out of developing software. I have, for all my adult life. The fact that it paid well, was gravy.
I do feel that I was incredibly fortunate to have landed into a field that I already loved. I guess that my loving it, made me much better at it.
Of course, there were lots of "friction points," along the way. Working for myself, in retirement, has removed all of them. The one thing that I miss, is working in a team.
Or as the sibling comment said, do you enjoy the vocation or the vacation more?
(Everything in moderation of course: Even the most interesting and meaningful project will turn into drudgery to some degree, simply due to the amounts of time involved. Also we're in the attention economy, so there are lots of things specifically designed to feel more rewarding in the short term than to work on a long-term project. Maybe the difference is how much meaning and reward there still stays besides the day-to-day drudgery)
I've often wondered about this (beyond basic abilities). I'm sure there are exceptional people for whom this is true but in my experience most people start out not being very good at what they later end up being really good at.
Would love to know if there's some sort of data / research on this.
Like, one of my nephews could dribble a soccer ball almost as soon as he could walk — it was astonishing how good he was at it at 20 months old. At three his ball control skills were as good as his father’s were at 9 or so (a father who was good enough to play in travel leagues in middle school, so no slouch).
No, at age 5, of course he can’t compete with adults who play in rec leagues. He doesn’t have the speed, strength, situational awareness, reflexes, or sense of of his options in a given situation.
But on the other hand, in isolation, he can almost always get the ball to go where he wants it. He’ll never in his life feel like that’s a skill he had to _learn_.
Whereas I’ve never been able to pick up dribbling at all regardless of how many hours of practice they subjected us to in phys ed.
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“Mary Jackson is a world-famous African-American sweetgrass basket weaver. In 2008, she was named a MacArthur Fellow for her basket weaving.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Jackson_(artist)?wprov=sf...
I have to say, that sounds more fulfilling than anything I will ever do. People who become the best at anything are usually truly extraordinary.
The deep end of anything almost always has some positives attached to it. The best basketball players make a ton of money. That doesn’t make it a good career option.
For more obscure activities it takes an unreal amount of effort and sacrifice to get near the deep end of the pool. I grew up knowing a lot of people who were the best of the best at their sports and poured their life into it, but none of them ended up making it professionally or getting into the Olympics despite a lot of trying.
For a hobby or sport it’s more enjoyable if you’re not trying to turn it into something more. Leave it as a relaxing thing you do on the side.
What you're really arguing is that SWEs are superior to basketweavers. But I wouldn't be so sure. That basket might well be around and admired long after the software's obsolete and gone.
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Nothing useful.
So I became a developer and data engineer, and I became really good at it even though, like the protagonist in Gattica (with whom I share other similarities), I had to work twice as hard and spend all my off hours obsessed with it because my nature worked against me.
While others with this natural prediliction could spend all their time in type 1 thinking I had to live in type 2.
But it was a success, and I found myself becoming an executive at long last on the strength of my technical abilities, and it turns out executives don't actually need to do much of anything and really, outside of maybe some complex CFO roles, executive roles are by far the easiest roles at existing profitable companies. I suspect csuite positions are actually the roles most secretly replaced by Ai already.
Making money in the profession that they enjoy, rather than having to take up one that they enjoy less.
But taking just the first one, the Buffet one. I think maybe that's how we get willing people in the bad companies? Bad companies doesn't even have to mean evil and morally wrong, it can mean bad decision making and poorly run. Companies can still be plenty lucky though and that accounts for a lot. But if the people who hate morally bad jobs or irrational decision making leave and the ones who don't hate them stay that's going to lead somewhere.
Maybe individually a "good" person will be happier (and perhaps poorer, if you have the belief that lower morals is an advantage in business). As a society, you'd probably really like that naysayers remain at companies. As a company leader, I don't know which one you'd like. It depends on your goals I guess. Overall, it strikes me as not capturing enough. The "job you don't hate" is broad. If you have a belief in something that should exist in the world and that company has a way of producing it, it doesn't seem to be wrong to work there trying to make that happen even against a tide of coworkers you hate, existing products you hate, social implications you hate. It's a lot of stress and work though with a low success rate. That's enough for a lot of people to say no, but more curiously it's enough for a lot of people to just change what they hate.
Agreed.
But I think you would have been worse off had you chosen a career in something you did not like, be it law or finance or fitness training etc.
What do you do when you have nothing else to do? I know that's really hard these days with all the distractions we have. So maybe what do you watch or read about? What are your interests?
But the world changes. I started out as an engineer and that got shipped to China. I pivoted to IT, shipped to India. Pivoted to technical writing and now there's LLMs.
I figure things out and share to make it easier for others too. That works in a lot of industries.
Switch from service-to-self to service-to-others, or vice versa.
See your mind as shut gates that can be opened to something already perfect.
Make your sub-conscious super-conscious - any tips there?
I remember Prince (musician) said he would receive things from God and send them back to source.
Cut the strings that make you a puppet??
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E.g. if you are low in extraversion and agreeableness, you probably wouldn't make a good nurse or waiter, but you might not make a bad lawyer or engineer.
I don’t know that these are awesome features for an engineer. There’s a big unsaid cost to this in my experience
And unless you're born rich, you start your life with debt: You need some form of retirement money for the last 20 something years you might not be able to work anymore.
If you buy assets on a loan/mortgage/etc, it's more like you're materializing this debt early.
I was proud to pay off my mortgage early, but missed out on nearly 20 years of tech-stock growth. That's a chasm rather than a nuance in retrospect, but there isn't a lot of nuance in aphorisms like "Avoid Debt Like the Plague."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ishida_Baigan
Two civilizations re-deriving the same short list from scratch is about the strongest version of your point — "outdated" just isn't the right axis for it.
Just because they're dead doesn't mean they were idiots. This is the young person's folly.
Then again, this attitude may be a substantial cause of what we define as progress. Gray areas are hard to figure out.
makes me wonder: is 'journey is the goal' just about as linear as 'means are the ends'? Then one can't get nonlinear interpolating between ("balancing") them
This, however
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48183167
(Same author or brand)
It's arguable that more than a handful of world-influencers are being their most improbable selves right this moment.. we could try and measure those degrees of nonlinearity
Maybe I'm wrong, but these comments sound more and more advertising than personal experience.
I didn't see any reason for you to type the whole LLM version following the casing so precisely, why would it matter?
I love this place, I really do, but this stuff gets a bit tiresome.
No intention to disrespect anyone, I said what the comment felt like.
But hey, maybe I'm really over-thinking, so I'll go off.
It is not a common theme. However, when I do post something like this, I find a lot of kindred spirits, so I guess we are the "quiet ones."
Most people -the vast majority- use agents and IDE integrations; sometimes, in amazing ways. It's a very different way of using LLMs from the way that I do. Maybe the way I use it is considered "quaint," and people don't want to admit it, because they are afraid folks will make fun of them. I don't really give a rat's buttocks. I'm retired, and long past the need to feed my insecurity by accepting the judgment of others.
I am big on checking out people's profiles, when I am interacting with them. Sometimes, it makes a big difference in the way that I approach them. That's why my own profile is packed full of information. I'm not showing off -many folks here, are a lot more impressive than I am- I just want people to know who I am.
But that doesn't prevent the usual Internet Ready, Fire, Aim approach.
And one habit that I deliberately foster, is not engaging folks that want to attack me, beyond one or two mild responses. Once I say "Have a Great Day!", we're done. You can add whatever last word gives you good feelz. I won't respond.
I also don't attack. I respect this community, and engaging in troll-battles, just makes it ugly. And I could be really good at trolling; I just feel as if you can't shovel shit, without getting it on you.
But if you are using AI to write all your code, I think you are missing a lot. It is like when you use LLMs to write your whole paper for you, rather than to check your grammar or offer critique of something you actually wrote.
And introversion can be a wonderful asset in some professions as well.
However, I do agree that conscientiousness is probably pretty universally better.
A highly extroverted person isn't going to make for a better overnight custodial worker than someone who prefers a more solitary lifestyle.
An actor who can tap into the emotional currents of high neuroticism in their work can offer a more sincere and authentic performance than an emotionally flat one.
Low conscientiousness correlates with risk taking and can be an asset in roles where over-planning to the detriment of acting can be costly - think firefighters.
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But true, I didn't check your profile initially, so, my conclusion was uncalled for, and wrong.
So, really, was not trolling, and no attacks intended.
We probably have a lot more in common, than differences. I'm always glad to find people to interact with.
I know that my HN persona is a bit "stuffy," because I'm going out of my way, not to be abrasive, and to contribute to the community, but there are folks that absolutely hate me -in a Commissioner Dreyfus kind of way-, and I'm not really sure why. Maybe it's the Apple thing.
Eh, whatevs. I'm "on the spectrum," and got used to people disliking me for no reason that they can even articulate. It used to really bother me, but these days, it's just background noise. I'm actually a fairly decent chap, and probably worth getting to know.
And, I really believe you are, and glad for having this conversation, This is something, I believe we all fell in love with the internet heh. As I'm going through a bad patch of life, this made me smile. Thank you.
Hopefully, it’s a short patch.
I sincerely wish you the best.
No stranger to bad patches, myself, but overall, I feel blessed.